DH Review: Nvidia 7950 GX2 1GB

Zardon

Read the review here
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Sometimes products are released which are variations on a theme, these products can usually be looked at in a few days and then our opinions passed on to you. On other occasions products are released which are unique and interesting enough to warrant much more in-depth testing and analysis. The Geforce 7950 GX2 is one such product. A graphics card unlike any other available to gaming enthusiasts, the GX2 combines two 7950 cores on two separate PCB’s with 1Gb of video memory in an attempt to make the fastest graphics card available on a single PCIe slot.

In this review Driver Heaven will be taking a look at how well the product performs in all of the usual gaming titles. In addition to this there will be in-depth testing at widescreen and ultra high resolutions, including advanced AA and AF settings and if that isn’t enough to answer any performance questions we will then take a look at the cards video playback performance of high definition content when compared to competitor part’s. Finally we will throw in a little overclocking to ensure that the benefits and downsides of the card are fully explored.

niceguyrichy

edit: works now, net being funny

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Erroneus

Alot of the flash movies wont load, anyone else seeing this problem?

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niceguyrichy

flash all working here

nother great review guys, bet it was real hard work spending all that time playing those games with that setup

i find it kinda strange to look at though, the pcb is practically bare! (especially compared to my x800 aiw)

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Zardon

try pressing refresh on the page.

Dark Lord

any chance we can get screenshots with some of these games maxed out like that?

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Zardon

Im sure stuart can oblige when he gets some time, he has already moved onto more hardware reviews/testing.

Customgamer1

To bad they did not use an X1900XTX to really show what ATI had to offer. I know it would and should still win but having an XT does not help ati's side at all lol.

Other wise great review!

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Asus Laptop: 2.5 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gigs DDR 2, Windows 7 64bit! Windows 7 > OSX!

Veridian3

The difference is only a couple of fps so really shouldnt matter, in the end we can only test on the products we are sent. In the case of the XTX since January i havent seen one...

...having said that, the XT is a far more attractive purchase than the XTX on the price/performance front and that does make it a more interesting comparison in my view.

Blackboost

I would love to see what two of these puppies could do in a SLI configuration!!

CDsDontBurn

a friend of mine has two of those in SLI.....he upgraded from two 7900GTXs, before, having two 7800GTXs, before that, he had two 6800Ultras in SLI, before that, he had a 6800Ultra AGP, before that, i don't know what he had

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SFOSOK

Please give away the 7950 GX2! man I'd probably pee myself if I had that card : (.

Great review, I got kinda confused on the single/dual card thing because I thought you guys would refer to it as one card but now I get it.

Awsome card, I will throw my poorness at it

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*Warning* - Explicit Content Preceeding



METAL!!

ronnn

Nice review! Little pricey for my blood, but all new hardware is that way at first.

Zardon

im not really sure thats an upgrade right now - two 7900GTXs in SLI are faster. possibly in the future when nvidia get the drivers going for quad it will be a faster solution.

CDsDontBurn

lol.....he's the type of person who likes to have the best of everything first.

you might of heard of him if you visit nvnews forums......goes by jaKup. i guess he's "highly prized" there

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Erroneus

Refreshing did the trick

It's a nice card, no doubt about. The only thing that worries me, if Nvidia can release drivers (beta) fast enough, to add SLI support for new games or else this card is slower then a 7900gt.

EG. i believe a game like GRAW took some time before it could benefit from SLI

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ChrisW

I'm disappointed to see yet another review using the default quality settings instead of setting the two cards to equivalent settings. I can only think this must be a condition nVidia imposes on reviewers in order to receive review hardware.

Sandok

Hmmm I fail to see what you mean ChrisW... All the cards were tested using the same in-game quality settings. Fear for example, all cards run at the same level of AF and AA with the same resoultion.

ChrisW

Default quality settings means the nVidia cards were set to "Quality" while the ATI cards were set to "High Quality", since those are their default settings.

Veridian3

As far as i am aware there is no reviewer rule which states you cannot bench at best quality. Having said that i would imagine that Nvidia wouldnt be too pleased if anyone did as it doesnt represent the performance that the majority of users will see.

I saw some statistics not too long ago about driver control panels and settings, 90% of end users dont even enter the control panel according to the survey and so the reviews you see on the web cater for these 90%.

We did however include a test in our review (a couple infact) where optimisations were off. These can be see on the enhanced AA/AF page.

My own opinion is that when you are flying round a game at 50fps+ it is near impossible in most cases to see any difference between ATI and NV rendering. There are some cases such as BF2 where this is not the case (and we would point out any issues in the review if we saw anything) however on the whole they are identical to the naked eye. Taking screenshots of particular frames does highlight some differences, i agree, this isnt representative of the gaming experience though.

Blackboost

I was under the impression that the drivers weren't ready yet.

brutusmaximus

yes but you are claiming that these settings arent comparible. this is the thing misunderstood about the so called ugly word "optimisations". Optimsations arent a bad thing, in the right instance they aid a particular game to run and look its best.

With ATI drivers running high quality there are still optimisations running via catalyst AI, with Nvidia drivers running at high quality there are no optimisations, with Nvidia drivers at quality it is comparible to ATI running at high quality with Catalyst AI on.

brutusmaximus

The drivers to run Quad SLI arent ready and buying two of The GX2s right now to run in Quad SLI is a waste of money, I think it will take nvidia quite some time to get them working right in the majority of games. The only title I know right now that works properly with 2x GX2 in Quad SLI is F.E.A.R.

ChrisW

That is completely untrue. NVidia just does not give the end-user the option to disable their optimizations. ATI listened to their customers and gave them the Calatyst A.I. option to disable their optimizations.

And no, those settings are not comparable. If you want equivalent settings, you should set them both to "Quality" or both to "High Quality". ATI defaults their A.I. setting to low while nVidia uses maximum optimizations all the time. It would be closer if you turned A.I. to high.

A.I. Normal=game bug fixes only.
A.I. Off=no game bug fixes. Some games will not work correctly or show graphical glitches.
A.I. Advanced=Game bug fixes and special optimizations to help increase performance (what nVidia's drivers do all the time).

BWX

I like the DH review menu on the side - that is a lot better tan the one that used to pop up from the bottom.


About the control panel settings.. It is very hard to get an equivalent setting between the two brands, there are so many variables.
What about the way they both do anisotropic filtering? They are completely different right now.. In most games you can't tell anyway.

One example of a game you can tell the difference in a lot is rFactor, or the other ISI GFX engine based race sim, GT Legends (DH reviewed that one). There are a lot of problems with Nvidia cards in those games. The lines on the road are either very aliased or very blurry, but you can't get a good result like you can with ATI.

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brutusmaximus

no that is incorrect. AI normal is not bug fixes only - try turning cat AI off in some games and you will see FPS decreases - unless of course you call that a "bug fix", there are certain optimisations for games ..... regardless the point you were making originally is not right, there is no way to equally compare cards across platforms, each company uses their own methods of rendering so to say "put both to high quality and this will give exactly the same results" is nonsense . If you put NVs to high quality it disables game optimisations - ATIs high quality STILL has Cat AI helping out with optimisations - that is the definition of Cat AI in the first place, One point id like to stress is "optimisations" on both sides ARENT "cheats" they are specific methods of rendering for certain titles to help make them run better, exactly the same as Catalyst AI without the fancy moniker.

If you can see any noticeable difference between high quality and quality on NV while playing a game then your eyesight is probably one of the best in the world and you are just picking holes in the review because I feel due to your prior position you side with ATI (as you always have done on this site).

Shocky

I've just bought a 7950 and I don't think the review does the card justise at all. even at stock its still allot faster then a X1900XTX and 7900GTX..

But heres the best part, these cards overclock allot !

I'm running this at 600/1600 right now. scoring around 8700 in 3dmark06...

Also, I game at 1920*1200 and the X1900XTX cannot cope at this resolution with eye candy enabled which is why I upgraded..

BWX

Well you better be careful- the 79xx series are notorious for dying a quick death when overclocked (or at default speed).

That goes for the chip on the gx2 as well. Just be careful..

http://www.evga.com/community/messag...TOPIC_ID=15366

Mine started acting up the other day- EVGA are cross-shipping me a new one.

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ChrisW

Wrong. The "Quality" and "High Quality" setting are for mipmap detail levels only. Switching from "Quality" to "High Quality" turns off the optimizations for mipmap detail levels only. It has no effect on all the other optimizations. NVidia's current optimizations are reasponsible for the shimmering seen by some people in certain games. It has absolutely nothing to do with the A.I. setting.

NVidia's officially announced position on optimizations is they will continue to do them and shader replacement as much as possible as long as it follows their official optimization guidelines. They have never retracted their official position and there is no reason to believe they ever would.

Changing A.I. to "Off" will increase performance in some games and will decrease performance in others. Some of the game bug fixes actually reduce performance and have been highly documented on the internet.

Basically, ATI is being punished by game reviewers for listening to their customers and allowing the end-user control over optimizations. A lot of them even turn on "High quality anisotropic filtering" on ATI cards just to slow them down even more, knowing nVidia's cards are incapable of this settings and that leaving this setting turned off would actually make both cards equivalent.

brutusmaximus

Really? interesting ive noticed FPS drops with Catalyst AI off, so I guess it must be the 3 or 4 machines ive tried this on. Unless there are "bugs" with the games and ATI have fixed this in Catalyst AI? mmmm.....

Of course in the end I gave up with Catalyst AI and the bloated CCC and went the nvidia route because basically the drivers never seem to work right with the games I play with numerous shadow problems and ingame abnormalities - lets hope your faith in ATI and their "listening to their customers" mean they ditch the hideous .net CCC. Basically I think ATI "are being punished" as you dramatically put it because their drivers really arent up to par and havent been for a good 6 months. Take a look at crossfire and the issues users are having with that. ATI need to sort out their driver support because right now the only ones I see being "punished" are the end users who buy their hardware.